When I visit family abroad, they always want to know one thing: “Is London safe?” My answer has always been: well, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t live there.
Recently, however, the question has taken on new relevance beyond the interest of my more sheltered relatives. If you’re on TikTok, Instagram or neighbourhood apps like Nextdoor, you might have spotted posts about how London has grown increasingly lawless.
Videos ranking the most dangerous boroughs, comments about how gangs, knife crime and theft have engulfed the city – I’ve even seen one content creator claim that taking a shortcut is enough to significantly increase your chances of “getting shanked [stabbed]”. An analysis from Kings College London lecturer Dr Mark J. Hill shows that posts on Reddit alone contributing to this narrative have increased from 874 in 2008 to almost 260,000 in 2024.
You might expect me to agree with some of these posts. I’ve lived here for over 15 years and in that time, I’ve had my phone snatched out of my hand twice, both times in the exact same neighbourhood. I had to go to hospital after a violent mugging in my teens and ended up in A&E again a few years ago when an XL bully attacked me and my dog. By rights, I should be the poster girl for London being a crime hotspot – I’ve certainly filed the number of Met Police reports to back it.
But in actual fact, I’ve been perplexed by the rise of these crimewave videos – they don’t seem to reflect my home which, despite my occasional brushes with danger over the years, feels as safe to me as any other major city in the world.
My impressions are broadly correct – according to one crime index, London is considered the 15th most dangerous city in Europe. That seems like an extraordinarily high ranking, until you realise that there are seven other cities in France that rank higher, including Paris. London isn’t even ranked the most dangerous city in the UK.
So what’s behind the spread of this type of content? According to Hill, some of the accounts responsible only ever post about London being a kind of crime-ridden dystopia and appear to use AI-generated profile pictures. In other words, they are what’s known as “sock puppet” accounts. Before you jump to speculation about Russian bot farms, he adds that there’s “no evidence” that this activity has been coordinated.
But because social media can “amplify voices, even a small number of accounts can be heard disproportionately… once that perception takes hold, ordinary users can amplify it without realising they’re participating in a narrative spiral,” he explains.
It doesn’t help that these accounts are being egged on by some of the most powerful people in the world. Just last year, Donald Trump claimed that there were no-go zones for police in London. According to JD Vance: “London doesn’t feel fully English.” Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, claims that it is “filled with crime” and “often doesn’t feel like Britain at all”.
Even some of our own politicians agree – somewhat incredibly, Reform leader Nigel Farage claims that people wouldn’t dare to walk around the West End after 9pm wearing jewellery.
But such narratives about London are nothing new – they’re merely the latest front for conservative panic about multiculturalism and immigration. The prevailing idea is that a city filled with immigrants – or indeed, a city built by immigrants, which is exactly what London is – must be crime-ridden by default.
You can see this happening after the London bombings in 2005, when some right-wingers peddled the myth that the city’s large Muslim population was creating “Londonistan” within the M25. (Twenty years on, Londonistan has yet to materialise – unless, of course, you are talking about the excellent range of Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurants now on offer across the capital.)
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These days, those who want to sow division and fear know better than being that blatantly offensive. Instead, their prejudices are disguised by supposed well-meaning concern for Londoners’ security and well-being.
The city isn’t perfect – the record number of mobile phone thefts attest to that – but rates of homicide and violent crime have all trended downwards. In fact, one analysis by journalist Fraser Nelson puts the murder rate at below 1 per 100,000, lower than at any other point in medieval, Regency or modern-day history.
Murder is the kind of crime that makes a city dangerous enough to hire armed guards and invest in barbed wire fences – and London is nowhere near that. There are lots of reasons why the capital might not be to someone’s taste (the criminally early closing times of pubs and bars; the skyrocketing rent, for starters). But lack of safety shouldn’t be one of them.
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